Kodee Kennings

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Kodee Kennings was the name of a fictional 8-year-old girl, supposedly the daughter of a U.S. Army soldier named Dan Kennings in post-invasion Iraq, whose plight was detailed in letters published in the Daily Egyptian, a student newspaper for Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, beginning in 2003. The hoax led to role-playing by several individuals who say they believed they were actors in a documentary film, but was discovered when reporters for the Chicago Tribune sought to interview Kodee.

The story was apparently concocted by either Michael Brenner, then an SIU student reporter, or by Jaimie Reynolds, a woman who claimed to be Colleen Hastings, the caregiver for the fictional Kodee. She allegedly passed a letter written as Kodee to Brenner at the Egyptian, which prompted a feature story published May 6, 2003; in the interview, "Kodee" told of how upset she was by an anti-war protest at the university campus, and her worries about her father "Dan" who was shipping off to Iraq with the 101st Airborne. Kodee's mother was said to be dead.

Over the next year, the Egyptian would publish, unedited, notes and letters from "Kodee", liberally strewn with misspellings and phonetic English, to update their readers about Dan's Iraq service or Kodee's daily life. A young friend of Reynolds', Caitlin Hadley, the daughter of a Nazarene minister, was recruited to play the part of Kodee for photographs, and a nurse, Patrick Trovillion, played Dan. "Kodee" was taken to the Egyptian newsroom and other Carbondale locations. "Dan" was photographed wearing camouflage, sitting on a tank, and meeting with school children in Michigan. Both believed that they were playing parts in a movie. "Dan" also called the newsroom and maintained an e-mail address at Yahoo! "Dan" was even portrayed as having been injured in a December, 2004 explosion in a mess hall at a base near Mosul, Iraq, then returned to duty just weeks later, and later to have been in a Humvee hit by an roadside bomb.

Reynolds or Brenner also apparently penned a guest editorial published in the name of a real war widow [1], which "confirmed" the existence of Kennings as a war buddy of her husband's.

The hoax unraveled when Hastings claimed in August 2005 that "Dan Kennings" had died in Iraq, which was published in the Egyptian. Reporters from the Tribune were notified of this development, in the belief it would make a good story, and became suspicious when "Hastings" routed interview requests through her contact at the Egyptian, Michael Brenner, who had become a close friend of hers. Reynolds attended a memorial service arranged at the local American Legion outpost, to which she invited members of the Egyptian staff, where both Reynolds and Hadley openly wept, and met with reporters briefly at a nearby Dairy Queen restaurant. She was told that media liaisons at The Pentagon were unable to confirm the existence of Kennings, let alone as a war casualty, but could not supply documentation herself. Reynolds was tracked down at her mother's home in Marion, Illinois by the license plate on her vehicle August 23.

Reynolds admits she was involved in the hoax, but charges Brenner with masterminding it. Brenner says he was unaware of the hoax at all. After numerous articles in the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Daily Egyptian itself, it appeared no crime was committed. The parents of Hadley were particularly upset, however and considered a restraining order against Reynolds.

In part as a result of its coverage of the hoax perpetrated on its own paper, the Daily Egyptian won the Illinois College Press Association's General Excellence award in 2006, as well as first place in the Investigative Reporting category, for its series on the hoax.